ABSTRACT
Our cultural splitting of ‘physical’ from ‘mental’ events is also customary in the area of audition. Within dualist and reductionist theory, sounds are usually thought of as physical events out in space, which must be distinguished from experiences of sound ‘in the mind’ or ‘in the brain’. However, the auditory sensors do not detect sounds as such. Rather, they pick up patterns of pressure variation in the air, which produce vibrations at the eardrums, whose intensity, frequency and phase relationships are neurally encoded by hair-cells in the inner ear, and conveyed via the auditory nerve to the brain. But there is no ‘experience of sound’ in the brain. The experienced sound which results from such stimulation is projected by the brain to the judged location of the acoustic stimulus, resulting in a sound as-perceived out in space.
